


That Which Does Not Kill Us: A Last Podcast Adventure

by Thrashdame



Category: Last Podcast on The Left (Podcast) RPF
Genre: Conspiracy Theories, Dear Gods why would you write that?, Not a self-insert either, Other, Serial Killers, The Occult, not a shipping fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 18:57:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20511887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thrashdame/pseuds/Thrashdame
Summary: What are the boys really afraid of, if not what they talk about all the time?





	1. What was that?...OH SHIT

The gavel sounded just as it would in every TV show and movie you’ve ever seen where the hero was not guilty, but found guilty all the same. The thudding of a guillotine. The striking of a dour bell. The sound of impending doom. 

“On one count of first-degree murder, we find the defendant, Benjamin Kissel, guilty.”

Now, Ben was no stranger to encounters with the law. He once broke a cross-dressing law as a conscientious objector, but this…this was beyond the pale. 

The press and other moral crusaders had a field day, of course. 

They knew about The Last Podcast on the Left and all the assorted shenanigans that Ben, along with Marcus and Henry, talked about. So what happened came as no surprise to some, really. All of those politicians and professional outrage-mongers saying the media influences copycats? They were right, damn it. Right. And now, they were ready to pounce on an apathetic public with claims of crazy podcasters and their suspicious fandoms. Another day, another moral panic. 

Ben was making a decent living as a podcaster, sure, but that didn’t exclude him from bigger dreams in the sphere of politics. But now that credibility went out the window, though he did joke to himself that he should have gotten himself elected first and he probably would have been let off the hook. 

He had a few fans waiting outside the courthouse, not crazy masses like Michael Jackson when he was on trial, but there were a small handful at the steps outside with the expected “Ben Kissel for President” t-shirts, which he appreciated now more than ever. He gave them a pained smile as he passed them on his way out to the car that was going to take him to the lockup. 

They, the fans, would happily proselytize about him being innocent. How he’d never do such a thing. How he didn’t do such a thing. You only had to listen to him talk for five minutes and you’d agree. Brutal murders were not something this man was capable of. 

He had the best fans in the world. 

But right now, he was all alone. 

Guilty.

He would eventually be sentenced to 20 years in prison.

He sat in the holding cell, silent, thinking.

He was a big enough guy. Maybe not the toughest, but he could cope with prison, at least for a little while. Unlike Marcus or Henry, he thought. Who, despite all of his family and friends were the first to come to mind, because this situation, fucked up as it was, was pretty much in their lanes.

Ben entertained himself for a while on a chain of events he formulated where prison was a place of the kind of unimaginable torture and suffering they’d been talking about for years when they talked about serial killers, cults and other assorted scenarios of humans being absolute shit to each other. That, of course, wasn’t the entertaining part. The entertaining part was him thinking which of these assorted tortures would his friends take some sick and ironic delight in after having talked about them all for so many years.

The Twitteratti were undoubtedly digging through the pasts of his cohorts, and even people adjacent to the podcast and stream - Travis, Holden and Jackie, undoubtedly - to dig up whatever dirt they could have. To make sense of it all, or to connect the dots on some non-existent motive. How truly scummy and evil they were despite mounds of public evidence that they were more wholesome than the public gave them credit for. They weren’t Mr. Rogers or anything, but…this was never on the table for them. Anyone could have seen that. 

The jovial spirit with which they presented the odd, the terrible, the terrifying, was never evidence of malice, never an indicator that any of these people would do anything like it. 

As for the other two, Henry was on the West Coast at the estimated time of the crime, when Ben was on the East, so the authorities had nothing on him, and frankly was so shocked at the situation that he barely talked to Ben for the past two years, the time it took for the case to go to trial and finally convict him for the murder of Marcus Parks.


	2. Alone in a Satanless World with Only a Thousand People to Talk To

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben lost his inherent goodness. What has Henry lost?

Henry was all alone in a padded cell. It might have been days since anyone had spoken to him last. He wasn’t sure. There was no daylight in this cell. Nothing for him to keep track of time with. 

It wasn’t too long ago that he was filled with all sorts of noises and voices, the way he would normally act on the podcast. The joy of being able to conjure a voice that filled a conversation with levity and humor escaped the podcast from time to time, filled the real and imagined world with so much levity and laughter, but that joy was replaced with the hollow feeling of routine, doing his job just to keep himself together after…after… 

Admittedly, the voices were helpful for the past couple of years, coping with the mess that was Ben’s trial and Marcus being just…missing. It never really felt like Marcus was gone. He hardly believed it. Marcus was fucking trolling them? Playing a shitty elaborate prank? Fucked off somewhere to get some peace and quiet and he’d be back, right? 

_I mean, they never found a body…_

Now alone in this cell, the voices had calmed down and he had to face the reality of the past two years. All the time, it seemed like, between the mess of what had been going on and where he was at now, he was losing his grip on reality. He wasn’t himself and hadn’t been for some time. 

He reminded himself once a day that his name was Henry Zebrowski. At least, when he thought maybe a day had passed.


	3. A Fate Worse Than Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things can always be worse.

Marcus was vaguely aware of the sun shining on his face. Everything was hazy. Days, nights, they all bled into each other. He maybe thought there had at least been two winters that had gone by. Just words that hung with him for a while like his long lost friends and associates.

“Cold, it’s cold today”. or “It hasn’t been cold in a while.” Just random thoughts that occurred to him. Relative conditions that shifted, a feeble attempt at marking time.

Someone helped him into his wheelchair in the morning. Someone helped him out at night. He looked out the window, or when the weather was nice, someone would roll him outside onto the deck so he could see the sun over the mountains. He didn’t do much else, of course. He was entirely incapable.

He was even skinnier now, too. Oh, sure, he was a rail back when the podcast was still a thing, but Ben and Henry never really thought there was something wrong with him, at least not without joking about things being “wrong” with him, but his weight was never an issue. Without the will to raise a fork, they had to feed him intravenously. The help-staff dutifully changed the drip when it was empty. Always on time, so very attentively. 

But then there was the muscle atrophy. Even if he had the energy to get up, his body would barely support him. 

More than the sun, inasmuch as he could be, he was also aware of the sores on his body from sitting all day, but he couldn’t force his mouth to protest, ask for something, anything. HELP.

He was still in there, somewhere, but it was buried, as if the part of him that wasn’t some bag of meat kept unnaturally alive and was someone named Marcus Parks who was stuck under a pile of heavy blankets and he couldn’t struggle his way out from under them.

Every so often there’d be a flash of who he used to be. Some shard of a memory trying to escape and fly away. He’d drum a hand reflexively, remembering a band he was in, before one of the help-staff would gently put a hand on his and say, “there there” as if to soothe him.

And it would work, because he had not the wherewithal to do anything other than comply. 

The odd sentence would escape his lips every so often, a quiet murmur that no one seemed to pay any mind to. Marcus knew it wasn’t right, though it had some familiar sounds and rhythm, but he couldn’t piece together why. 

“My goose is late, son.”

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know why I started writing this. Maybe it's because with 9/11 coming up again, I'm stuck with my own memories of the event and other assorted fears that I'm coping with. 
> 
> But there's a blueprint here. There's a set of ideas. It will all be ideas we're familiar with.
> 
> That said, it's my first RPF, and I have mixed feelings about it.
> 
> On one hand, these people are public figures.
> 
> On the other, if someone were to speculate about what I was afraid of, I might get weird about it. 
> 
> That said, this may get taken down if I don't feel like continuing, or (as something akin to what Weird Al might do), if the people being depicted don't like it.


End file.
